Quick SEO Audit in Minutes
Search Engine Optimization, the word itself suggests the huge amount of work required to optimize a website for search engines like Google. An SEO specialist's work can never get finished; one may spend an entire lifetime to optimize the website and at last, you will still find something to improve in your website.
Well, if you are in the same position, here’s how to avoid spending long hours detecting the website and do a quick SEO audit for the website.
1. Crawl Your Website:
A comprehensive audit is helpful for the overall health of any website. Initiate the process by typing URL of the website into your favorite SEO crawling tool. Just make sure the tool is capable of handling every resource on the website namely, CSS, JavaScript, Images, Flash, Video, etc. Crawling process takes only moments based on the size of the website crawled.
2. Check for Crawlability Issues:
Once your website is crawled, the next step is to identify the issues affecting the crawl-ability of the website. These may include concerns like robot.txt errors, sitemap errors, or HTTP response code errors.
- Resolve Sitemap Errors:
Once your website is crawled, the next step is to identify the issues affecting the crawl-ability of the website. These may include concerns like robot.txt errors, sitemap errors, or HTTP response code errors
- Resolve robots.txt errors:
A robots.txt error suggests that one of your website pages might be blocked from indexing on search engines. It could be due to a number of reasons like ‘noindex' tag in the <head> section; ‘Xrobots’ tag in the HTTP header. Check to see if any pages are not indexed. If they are blocked, you need to add allow rule for that page to index it for the search engine.
- Resolve HTTP response code errors:
HTTP response code errors can be identified under a Crawl>Crawl errors section in Google Search Console. Fix problems pertaining to internal links or links that direct to similar pages. Once all the errors are fixed, recrawl your website. To do this, look for Fetch as Google option under crawl category in Google Search Console and enter the URL of the page. Press the Fetch button and see if the error is rectified.
3. Fix Page Redirects:
Redirects suggest that the page required by the visitor is either moved or the URL for that page is changed. If such pages don’t redirect visitors to a right page, then it will ultimately pose threat to SEO. Here are some common redirects you need to take into account:
- 302 redirect: A 302 redirect enables search engines to know that your website page is temporarily unavailable to the visitor and it will be returned in a short time.
- Meta Refresh: It accounts for inserting code into the metadata of the page. Spammers generally make use of it to redirect visitors to irrelevant content.
- Canonical URL: Multiple pages with duplicate content can generate rel="canonical" issues. Make sure that for such pages; a primary page is indicated using a canonical URL.
4. Fix CSS and HTML markup errors:
Coding errors have the potential to slow down your website in terms of speed. Check to see if there are any coding errors. Pages containing W3C errors, page frames or too big in size must be checked upon during audits.
5. Check upon the links:
When you are doing Search Engine Optimization audit, it is necessary to look out for any broken link and fix it. Use a 301 redirect to point such links to relevant and updated content. To avoid fixing such issues over and again, there are some points you can take:
- Limit the number of outgoing links from your website
- Limit the number of redirects
- Change dynamic URLs
- Long URLs are not good sometimes, shorten it
6. Check Title tags, Meta tags, and Header tags:
There is no harm in optimizing the meta tags for your website pages as it always returns your website with good credibility points from search engines. Search engines require these tags to identify what type of content that particular page offers to its visitors.
- Add empty meta description but make sure it is short
- Avoid creating duplicate meta title and description
- Focus on header tags and include specific phrases or keywords that users are likely to search for
Conclusion:
Although the above-mentioned points do not guarantee you for a complete SEO audit, it does help you for a quick check on your website. It will help you resolve some of the major concerns pertaining to the website's search engine credits. If you have any doubt, then mention in a comment section.
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